An Interview With Darcia Narvaez On Her Award-Winning Book – Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture, and Wisdom

Interview with Darcia Narvaez, PhD from IEI at ND on Vimeo.

Darcia Narvaez, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame and recipient of the 2015 William James Book Award from the American Psychological Association, discusses her latest publication, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture, and Wisdom.  Narvaez is an international advisory board member and contributing editor for Kindred.  Read her posts on Kindred.

“The audience for the book is parents and those who are interested in child development, ethics, culture and wisdom,” says Narvaez. “It is important for us to understand how needy babies are and that they are born 9-18 months early. They should be in the womb another 18 months and because of that they need an external womb experience of compassion and responsiveness.”

The book is described as a wide-ranging exploration of the role of childhood experiences in adult morality.

Winner of the William James Book Award from the American Psychological Association in 2015
Winner of the William James Book Award from the American Psychological Association in 2015

Moral development has traditionally been considered a matter of reasoning―of learning and acting in accordance with abstract rules. On this model, largely taken for granted in modern societies, acts of selfishness, aggression, and ecological mindlessness are failures of will, moral problems that can be solved by acting in accordance with a higher rationality. But both ancient philosophy and recent scientific scholarship emphasize implicit systems, such as action schemas and perceptual filters that guide behavior and shape human development. In this integrative book, Darcia Narvaez argues that morality goes “all the way down” into our neurobiological and emotional development, and that a person’s moral architecture is largely established early on in life. Moral rationality and virtue emerge “bottom up” from lived experience, so it matters what that experience is. Bringing together deep anthropological history, ethical philosophy, and contemporary neurobiological science, she demonstrates where modern industrialized societies have fallen away from the cultural practices that made us human in the first place.

Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality advances the field of developmental moral psychology in three key ways. First, it provides an evolutionary framework for early childhood experience grounded in developmental systems theory, encompassing not only genes but a wide array of environmental and epigenetic factors. Second, it proposes a neurobiological basis for the development of moral sensibilities and cognition, describing ethical functioning at multiple levels of complexity and context before turning to a theory of the emergence of wisdom. Finally, it embraces the sociocultural orientations of our ancestors and cousins in small-band hunter-gatherer societies―the norm for 99% of human history―for a re-envisioning of moral life, from the way we value and organize child raising to how we might frame a response to human-made global ecological collapse.

Integrating the latest scholarship in clinical sciences and positive psychology, Narvaez proposes a developmentally informed ecological and ethical sensibility as a way to self-author and revise the ways we think about parenting and sociality. The techniques she describes point towards an alternative vision of moral development and flourishing, one that synthesizes traditional models of executive, top-down wisdom with “primal” wisdom built by multiple systems of biological and cultural influence from the ground up.

1 Comment
  1. Sirirat says

    Good idea

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